Question

A company needs to deploy identical multi-VM environments (development, test, and production) that each contain virtual networks, load balancers, storage accounts, and several VMs. The infrastructure must be defined declaratively, version-controlled in Git, validated before deployment, and support what-if preview to show changes before they are applied. Native Azure tooling is preferred with no third-party licensing. Which approach should you recommend?

Accepted Answer

Use Azure Bicep templates stored in a Git repository and deploy them through an Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions pipeline using what-if validation

Answer

Write PowerShell scripts that call New-AzVM and related cmdlets sequentially and run them manually for each environment

Answer

Manually build one environment in the Azure portal, then export it and use the portal's clone feature for the other environments

Answer

Use Azure Automation runbooks with imperative scripts triggered on a schedule to reprovision resources